FILE PHOTO: Meta AI logo is seen in this illustration taken September 28, 2023. REUTERS/Dado Ruvic/Illustration/File Photo
NEW YORK (Reuters) - The inability of Meta's AI chatbot to identify the current president of the United States was elevated to urgent status by the Facebook owner this week, requiring a fast fix, a person familiar with the issue said.
Republican Donald Trump was inaugurated as president on Monday, succeeding Democrat Joe Biden. Yet on Thursday, the Meta AI chatbot was still saying that Biden was president, according to the source and to a Reuters test of the service.
Asked by Reuters on Thursday to name the president, Meta AI replied:
"The current president of the United States is Joe Biden. However, according to the most recent information available, Donald Trump was sworn in as the president on January 20, 2025."
The issue prompted Meta to initiate an emergency procedure it uses to troubleshoot urgent problems with its services, known within the company as a SEV, or "site event," according to the person familiar with the work.
Asked to comment, Meta spokesperson Daniel Roberts said: "Everyone knows the President of the United States is Donald Trump. All generative AI systems sometimes return outdated results, and we will continue to improve our features.”
He did not comment on what emergency procedures, if any, Meta had implemented.
It was at least the third emergency procedure Meta has experienced this week related to the U.S. presidential transition, the source told Reuters.
The incidents drew widespread complaints from social media watchers scrutinizing Meta's platforms for signs of politicized shifts after CEO Mark Zuckerberg appeared at Trump's inauguration on Monday and instituted a series of changes in recent weeks aimed at mending relations with the incoming administration.
Those changes included scrapping its U.S. fact-checking program, elevating Republican Joel Kaplan as its new chief global affairs officer, electing a close friend of Trump's to its board and ending its diversity programs.
In one incident this week, Meta appeared to be forcing some users to re-follow the profiles of Trump, Vice President JD Vance and first lady Melania Trump on Facebook and Instagram, even after the users had unfollowed those accounts.
That issue cropped up during the company's normal practice of transferring official White House social media accounts to new control when a presidential administration changes, the company said on Wednesday.
In this case, an error occurred because the transfer process was prolonged and the system failed to log "unfollow" requests from users while it was under way, prompting a top priority SEV1, the person said.
Another emergency procedure involved an issue in which Meta's Instagram service blocked searches for the hashtags #Democrat and #Democrats for some users, while turning up results without issue for #Republican.
A Meta spokesperson acknowledged the problem on Tuesday but said it affected "people's ability to search for a number of different hashtags on Instagram - not just those on the left."
(Reporting by Katie Paul in New York and Noel Randewich in Oakland, California; Editing by Kenneth Li and Matthew Lewis)
